The Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Collection is a gathering of 215 Medieval
or Renaissance manuscripts that date from the eleventh through the seventeenth
centuries (bulk fifteenth through seventeenth centuries). Each item has a designated
shelf mark (HRC 1 through HRC 225) and the items are organized by shelf mark number.

A substantial number of the texts are religious in content, though a number of other
general subjects—including alchemy, architecture, astronomy, botany, cartography,
classical literature, diplomacy, drama, genealogy, government, heraldry, history,
kings and rulers, law, literature, mathematics, medicine, monasticism and religious
orders, music, philosophy, poetry, science, and war—are also represented.

The earliest manuscript in the collection (HRC 29) is an eleventh-century codex of
various texts compiled by Abbot Ellinger of Tegernsee, which is informally known
as
the "Bede manuscript" since Bede's De
Natura Rerum is the first text.

Because of their magnificent illuminations, the best-known medieval manuscripts in
the collection are the books of hours, which contain prayers and offices used
for
devotion by the laity. Of the eleven books of hours in the collection, all of
them
dating from the fifteenth-century, seven came from France, which was a major center
for the production of such books during that era. The most notable of these—known
as
the "Belleville Hours" (HRC 8)—was made for the
Belleville family, who, from the eleventh-century until the French Revolution,
owned
large land estates.

The collection also contains Biblical texts and service books used in church liturgy
or worship, such as antiphonaries, breviaries, graduals, rituals, prayer books,
psalters, and sermons. Among these is a fifteenth-century German ferial psalter
and
hymnal (HRC 114) important for its stylistic relationship to the Gutenberg Bible
and
early printed psalters.

Another major category of manuscripts includes classical texts, with copies of works
by Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Plato among others, as well as literary works from
the
Middle Ages, whose texts were composed by Chaucer, Dante, and Petrarch.

This collection was previously known as the Pre-1700 Manuscript Collection. During
recent cataloging, ten items that were found to post-date 1700—or that were more
appropriate to another Ransom Center collection (e.g. the Eastern Manuscripts
Collection)—were removed from this collection.

Detailed item-level descriptions and digital facsimiles of restricted items are available in a searchable database.